The Dangerous Age eBook

When I enter the new home you have planned for me,
a lonely and divorced woman, I shall think of you
every day, and my thoughts will speak more cordial
thanks than I can set down coldly in black and white
on this paper.

I do not forbid you to write to me, but, save for
a word of farewell, I would prefer your silence.
No letters exchanged between us could bring back so
much as a reflection of the happy hours we have spent
together. Hours in which we talked of everything,
and chiefly of nothing at all.

I do not think we were very brilliant when we were
together; but we were never bored. If my absence
brings you suffering, disappointment, grief—­lose
yourself in your work, so that in my solitude I may
still be proud of you.

You taught me to use my eyes, and there is much, much
in the world I should like to see, for, thanks to
you, I have learnt how beautiful the world is.
But the wisest course for me is to give myself up to
my chosen destiny. I shut the door of my “White
Villa”—­and there my story ends.

Your
ELSIE LINDTNER.

Reading through my letter, it seems to me cold and
dry. But it is harder to write such a letter
to a dear friend than to a stranger.

LANDED ON MY ISLAND.
CREPT INTO MY LAIR.

The first day is over. Heaven help me through
those to come! Everything here disgusts me, from
the smell of the new woodwork and the half-dried wallpapers
to the pattering of the rain over my head.

What an idiotic notion of mine to have a glass roof
to my bedroom! I feel as though I were living
under an umbrella through which the water might come
dripping at any moment. During the night this
will probably happen. The panes of glass, unless
they are very closely joined together, will let the
water through, and I shall awake in a pool of water.

Awake, indeed! If only I ever get to sleep!
My head aches and burns from sheer fatigue, but I
have not even thought of getting into bed yet.

For the last year I have had plenty of time to think
things over, and now I am at a loss to understand
why I have done this. Suppose it is a piece of
stupidity—­a carefully planned and irrevocable
folly? Suppose my irritable nerves have played
a trick upon me? Suppose ... suppose ...

I feel lonely and without will power. I am frightened.
But the step is taken; and I can never turn back.
I must never let myself regret it.

What shall I come to, reduced to the society of two
females who have nothing in common with me but our
sex? No one to speak to, no one to see.
Jeanne is certainly attractive to look at, but I cannot
converse with her. As to Torp, she suits her
basement as a gnome suits his mountain cave.
She looks as though she was made to repopulate a desert
unaided. She wears stays that are crooked back
and front.